T-Mobile Adds More Streaming Music Providers to Its Music Freedom Service

When T-Mobile announced Music Freedom several months ago, it started with just a little over half a dozen streaming partners at launch. Today, including three new ones, the carrier now has 31 different streaming audio partners. For those of you who don't know, Music Freedom is a service perk that T-Mobile gives to select Simple Choice Postpaid and Simple Choice Prepaid customers. Customers on any of those qualifying plans are able to stream music from various providers without having the corresponding data that is being used count against their data cap. This seems like a great play by T-Mobile to both attract new customers, as well as to increase their bottom line. I have to presume T-Mobile is financially benefiting from all the providers it has negotiated contracts with to allow such a service, and the providers are benefiting from increased exposure to their products. Over the past few days the new providers that T-Mobile has added to its Music Freedom program include "Tidal Music," "BandCamp," and "Mixcloud." The most interesting of the bunch is Tidal Music, which is a rather expensive streaming music service costing $19.99/month. What makes it interesting though is that it bills itself as a high fidelity music service that offers lossless audio coded with the Flac codec. Being lossless of course means that if you are using the service with a regular provider you would quickly eat up your data, so kudos to T-Mobile for allowing this service into their program. The other providers T-Mobile has included in the Music Freedom program are

iHeart

Pandora

Spotify

Slacker

Google Play Music

iTunes Radio (iTunes Match and iTunes song previews are not included)

Rhapsody

SoundCloud

RadioTunes

Digitally Imported

Fit Radio

Samsung Milk

AccuRadio

BlackPlanet Radio

Grooveshark

Rdio

Radio Paradise

Songza

SiriusXM

Mad Genius Radio

radioPup

Xbox Music

Fresca Radio

JAZZRADIO

Live365

Radio.com

ROCKRADIO

Saavn

So how many of you out there are benefiting from Music Freedom? I regularly stream 2-3 hours a day using TuneIn radio and have yet to ever go over my 5 GB LTE data cap with T-Mobile's $30 prepaid plan. I just recently subscribed to Xbox Music, so I'll soon find out if I use enough data to go over my cap with that service into the mix.